Whereas many writers try to achieve distinction by writing about exotic characters or exotic situations, the Canadian author Alice Munro has chosen to write about very ordinary events in the lives of very ordinary women. In fact, the significant events in her stories are so apparently inconsequential as to drive a blurb-writer to despair. (For instance, on the back cover of T. Coraghessan Boyle's collection Descent of Man, one finds the following capsule descriptions of stories: ``A primate-center researcher becomes romantically involved with a chimp; a Norse poet overcomes bard-block; ... and Lassie abandons Timmy for a randy coyote.'' For Alice Munro's book, a similar attempt at capsule descriptions would result in something like, ``A family visits friends for dinner on Labor Day; a woman recovering from a recent love affair spends a day on a remote island and has conversations with a group of three working men and an elderly gentleman interested in Willa Cather; while a woman is having dinner at the house of a man she is in love with, another, much younger woman shows briefly up at the door; two old women in a nursing home cross swords over a male stroke victim who is unable to talk.'' Somehow it is hard to imagine that a lot of copies of the book would be sold on the basis of such capsule descriptions.)
The subject of many of these stories is what is generally called romantic love, either love that the characters are doing their best to make work, or love they are recovering from. But there is little romance in the love Munro's women find, and certainly none of the grand passions and infatuations with which fiction so often concerns itself. Instead, Munro's women find comfort in the best love available to them, or are unhappy over the loss of a love that was not all that good to start with.
For instance when Wilfred, in ``Visitors,'' proposed to Mildred, they were both middle-aged and his way of proposing was to say, ``Why not end up in Logan? I've got a house there. It's not so big a house, but it will take two.''
Mildred asked him why he had never been married before.
He said he had often been on the go, and besides, it wasn't often you met a good-hearted woman.
In ``Prue,'' a man (Gordon) the protagonist used to live with says to her, ``The problem is that I think I would like to marry you,'' to which Prue answers lightly, ``What a problem.'' But she knows that for Gordon it is indeed a problem. Shortly afterwards a young woman shows up briefly on Gordon's doorstep and Gordon tells Prue, ``I think I'm in love with this person,'' but adds, ``But I do think I want to marry you, in a few years time.''
``After you get over being in love?'' Prue asks, and Gordon nods.
Like all of Munro's heros, Prue doesn't make a big drama out of the inadequate nature of the love offered her. In fact,
She gives parties and goes to parties; she goes out sometimes with other men. Her attitude toward sex is very comforting to those of her friends who get into terrible states of passion and jealousy, and cut loose from their moorings. She seems to regard sex as a wholesome, slightly silly indulgence, like dancing and nice dinners~--- something that shouldn't interfere with people's being kind and cheerful to each other.
Prue's true dissatisfaction is revealed in only one small way, something she doesn't tell her friends about: she sometimes steals small items from Gordon's house; cufflinks, a sterling silver spoon, a small enamelled dish. She takes these home and stows them in an old tobacco tin.
These are not sentimental keepsakes. She never looks at them, and often forgets what she has there. They are not booty, they don't have ritualistic significance. She does not take something every time she stays over, or to mark what might might call memorable visits. She doesn't do it in a daze and she doesn't seem to be under a compulsion. She just takes something, every now and then, and puts it away in the dark of the old tobacco tin, and more or less forgets about it.
In ``Bardon Bus,'' the narrator is still getting over an affair from the previous summer while on a field trip in Australia. She still thinks obsessively about the man. She envies her friend Kay for moving from one affair to another, going to extremes in falling in love and falling miserably out of it. Kay's loves ``are daring, sometimes grotesque.''
When the narrator tells Kay she is getting over a man, Kay advises,
``No rush, take it easy.''I think about the words ``getting over.'' They have an encouraging, crisp, everyday sound. They are in tune with Kay's present mood. When love is fresh and on the rise, she grows mystical, tentative; in the time of love's decline, and past the worst of it, she is brisk and entertaining, straightforward, analytical.
``It's nothing but the desire to see yourself, reflected,'' she says. ``Love always comes back to self-love. The idiocy. You don't want them, you want what you can get from them. Obsession and self-delusion.''
Kay herself is presently getting over a man named Roy. But recently, she tells the narrator, she has met a friend of Roy's. We realize that that this friend is destined to become Kay's next affair, and the narrator realizes that this friend is in fact her own ex-lover Alex.
In ``Accident,'' the protagonist, Frances, actually got the love she wanted, as a result of an accident causing the death of her lover's son. Now, thirty years later, she and Ted are still married and have had two daughters, in addition to the two daughters from Ted's previous marriage. And yet she's not altogether sure that having her life change that way was really so important after all.
What difference, thinks Frances. She doesn't know where that thought comes from or what it means, for of course there's a difference, anyone can see that, a life's a difference. She's had her love, her scandal, her man, her children. But inside she's ticking away, all by herself, the same Frances who was there before any of it.Not altogether the same, surely.
The same.
I'll be as bad as mother when I get old, she thinks, turning eagerly to greet somebody. Never mind. She has a way to go yet.
In the title story, the narrator waits for her father to decide to undergo heart surgery while at the same time try to solve the riddle of her two grown daughters' lives, especially Nichola, who at the moment is holding herself incommunicado. She remembers a time when Nichola, at the age of five, had been suspected of having a life-threatening illness. She remembers that at that time, she sensed that the way she touched Nichola changed, although she thought the change was not detectable.
I saw how the forms of love might be maintained with a condemned person but with the love in fact measured and disciplined, because you have to survive. It could be done so discreetly that the object of such care would not suspect, any more than she would suspect the sentence of death itself. Nichola would not know, did not know. Toys and kisses and jokes would come tumbling over her; she would never know, though I worried that she would feel the wind between the cracks of the manufactured holidays, the manufactured ordinary days. But all was well. Nichola did not have leukemia. She grew up~--- was still alive, and possibly happy. Incommunicado.
She spends the day before her father's dangerous operation going to the planetarium, then that evening discusses the planetarium show with him in their usual fashion, giving him, in fact, a ``manufactured ordinary day.''
That same day, she imagines the possibility of seeing Nichola.
If I did see her, I might just sit and watch, I decided. I felt like one of those people [having a near-death experience] who have floated up to the ceiling, enjoying a brief death. A relief, while it lasts. My father had chosen and Nichola had chosen. Someday, probably soon, I would hear from her, but it came to the same thing.
Although Alice Munro's characters are all notable for their ordinariness, in the stories ``The Connection,'' ``The Stone in the Field,'' ``The Turkey Season,'' and ``Visitors'' this very ordinariness is so extreme that it becomes almost exotic, by the standards of most fiction. These are people like many of the relatives and neighbors I knew when growing up~--- people for whom a comment about the weather represents a major conversational foray, people for whom a trip to the doctor is a major event and the subject of anecdotes for months afterwards. It would never have occurred to me that it would be possible to write a story around people like these.
In ``Visitors,'' Wilfred says to his wife Mildred about his brother Albert, who he hasn't seen for thirty years, ``He went out to Saskatchewan. He has a job managing a grain elevator. I don't know what he gets paid but I imagine it's pretty good. He went to business college, like yourself. He's a different person than me, way different.'' News of Albert's coming visit puts Wilfred into ``a dither of hospitality, reassurances, amazement.''
But Albert and his wife and sister-in-law prove to be even more limited in perspective and imagination than Wilfred and Mildred. Their life seems to revolve around the Pentacostal church and they don't appreciate it when Wilfred brings whisky and gambling into the conversation. Albert spends most of the first day of his visit sleeping, with the curtains drawn, saying that he's just tired. The sister and sister-in-law spend most of their time crocheting, explaining that their tableclothes are donated to the church, where they are sold for hundreds of dollars.
And yet despite their failure to establish any real communication with these three relatives, on the night after they leave, Mildred finds Wilfred crying.
``Albert and I will probably never see each other again,'' said Wilfred in a loud voice with no trace of tears, or any clear indication of either satisfaction or regret.``Unless we did go to Saskatchewan,'' said Mildred. An invitation had been extended, and she had thought at the time she would be as likely to visit Siberia.
``Eventually,'' she added.
``Eventually, maybe,'' Wilfred said. He gave a prolonged, noisy sniff that seemed to signal content. ``Not next week.''
In ``The Stone in the Field,'' the protagonist is taken by her parents for a visit to her father's sisters, who turn out to be the relatives from Hell. These aunts don't own a car, but still drove a horse and buggy, just as they have no telephone or washing machine.
These aunts, like those who engage in a chat with royalty, could venture no remarks of their own, but could only answer questions. They offered no refreshments. It was clear that only a great effort of will kept them all from running away and hiding, like Aunt Susan, who never did appear while we were there.
Alice Munro writes in an easy conversational voice. Five of the twelve stories in this volume are in first person, two are primarily in present tense, many are in an easy conversational voice, as if the author were saying, ``Let me tell you about something that happened to a friend of mine.''
She breaks many of the commonly taught rules for writing stories. In many of her stories, not very much happens and sometimes the characters do not change in any clearly noticeable way.
In ``Labor Day Dinner,'' for instance, as George and Roberta and Roberta's teen-age daughters Angela and Eva visit their friends Valery and her grown children for dinner, we learn a lot about the dynamics of the relationship between George and Roberta, who married only two years ago, and about his relationship with his two step-daughters, and about how they are all attempting to make this new relationship work. At the end of the story, nothing has really changed, and nothing really happens, until on the very last page they are saved only by a matter of yards from a fatal traffic accident.
Munro consistently ignores the rule about showing rather than telling. In fact, in most of these stories, the most significant happenings happen off-stage or before the time of the actual story.
``Hard Luck Stories,'' for instance, shows a conversation between the narrator and her friend Julie, a woman who, despite being married, had onced believed that she had totally missed out on love.
The narrator had once told Julie that there are two kinds of love.
``There's the intelligent sort of love that makes an intelligent choice. That's the kind you're supposed to get married on. Then there's the kind that's anything but intelligent, that's like a possession. And that's the one, that's the one everybody really values. That's the one nobody wants to have missed out on.''
And at that time, Julie's thought had been, ``Have I missed out on every kind? I haven't even got to tell the different kinds apart.''
Although Julie is now having a very satisfying affair with a man named Douglas, the story never tells us anything about Julie's relationship with Douglas or how they fell in love. Instead, the narrator's conversation with Julie tells of the day when Julie and Douglas first met, a day they spent with the narrator. But instead of focusing on Douglas, this conversational flashback is occupied primarily with the conversation Julie and the narrator had that day, a conversation that mostly consisted of Julie's telling of two previous interactions with men, interactions that might have turned into affairs but never did, and the narrator telling of a rather strange experience she once had with a lover. These flashbacks within a flashback are the ``hard luck stories'' of the title.
The narrator's story on that day had been about having been taken by a lover to a dinner party given by a rich woman who was generally agreed to be bitchy and selfish, ``a sexual monster,'' in the man's words, although he acknowledged that he had once been once her lover. But eventually the narrator had realized that her lover was still in love with the woman and had brought her to the dinner party to counter her with.
``I was his sensible choice. I was the woman he liked. I couldn't stand that. I couldn't stand it. It was so humiliating. I told him he didn't really love me. That was enough. He wouldn't stand for anyone telling him things about himself.''
Julie's first story was about a young man she started to get to know when she was first married, and had thought that she might fall in love with, but before that could happen she discovered that he was only seventeen and was a patient in a mental hospital. Her second story was about a leader of an encounter group who had pursued her, writing her several letters a day, claiming to be obsessively in love with her. And although she resisted his overtures, she did let them become a part of her life that she depended on to some extent, until he came out that this psychologist was in fact sleeping with one women in each of the several groups he led.
And now, back in the present time, Julie has found with Douglas the sort of love that up till then had always eluded her.
``Isn't it like one of those ironical-twist-at-the-end stories that used to be so popular? I really did think that I was asked along to protect you. No, not protect, that's too vulgar, but I thought you felt something and you were being prudent, and that was why me. Wouldn't it make a good story?''